STEPHEN HOLMES, New York University - School of Law
Email: stephen.holmes@nyu.edu

Emergency-room personnel are acutely aware of the serious risks posed by excessive delay. Understanding the need for immediate and unhesitating action, they nevertheless routinely consume precious time to follow protocols drilled into them and practiced in advance. Why do they do this? They do it, quite obviously, to minimize the risk of making fatal but avoidable mistakes due to the psychologically flustering pressures of the moment. The aim in this piece is to tease out some of the implications of this everyday emergency-room experience - implications, in particular, for designing a more effective response to what President Bush labeled “a national emergency.�

MARK A. ROTHSTEIN, University of Louisville - Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy, and Law, University of Louisville - Louis D. Brandeis School of Law
Email: mark.rothstein@louisville.edu

It has been pending in Congress for twelve years, despite the support of the last Presedential Adminstrations and the National Institutes of Health. It has been the subject of extensive lobbying by acedemic medical centers, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, genetic advocacy groups, and civil rights organizations. It has overcome vehement objections by employers and insurers. Its final passage however, has been thwarted by a few Congressional leaders, who have prevented enactment despite overwhelming bi-patisian support in both houses of Congress.

PATTY SKUSTER, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: skusterp@ipas.org

This paper recommends an interpretation of the mental health indication for legal abortion that can help to reduce high rates of death and injury from unsafe abortion. Legal abortion to preserve a women's mental health is explicitly recognized in the laws of 23 countries. However, health care and law enforcement communities in different countries interpret these laws in varied ways, giving rise to a range of access to safe abortion among countries with similar laws. In this paper, I first show that the interpretation of the mental health indication is flexible through a comparative study of several countries. In the second section of the paper, I propose an interpretation that would help ensure access and that is supported by global health authorities and psychological research. Lastly, I present empirical and legal support for the notion that abortion can lead to favorable mental health outcomes, as is implicit in the mental health indication.

PAUL A. LOMBARDO, Georgia State University - College of Law
Email: plombardo@gsu.edu

In 1929 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent biologist and leader in the American eugenics movement, carried out an experimental castration of a "Mongoloid dwarf" at a New York State mental institution. His goal was to retrieve tissue for chromosomal analysis in an attempt to understand the basis of syndromal mental retardation. Davenport was assisted in the research by cytologist T.S. Painter, who later achieved scientific celebrity for his work in counting human chromosomes. Davenport also invited George Washington Corner, who eventually contributed to the discovery of progesterone, to participate in the experiment. Davenport planned and carried out the surgery using the questionable promise of therapeutic benefit to elicit consent from a parent with limited mental capacity on behalf of an even more seriously impaired institutional resident. Archival evidence demonstrates that even at that date scientists like Davenport and the physicians he collaborated with were sensitive to ethical issues such as the necessity for consent and questions of decisional capacity, as well as the potential for negative publicity for mistreatment of "research subjects."